Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 897 posts

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#691

Post by skeeter2020 »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #673
JKCalhoun wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own tangential gripe (a bit related to yours though): the factory work began when Agile crept into the workplace. Additionally, lint, unit tests, code reviews... all this crap just piled on making programming worse still. It stopped being fun to code around that point. Too many i's to dot to make management happy.

What's wrong with writing tests? I sleep well at night when we push to production because of our robust test suite.

From my perspective it's not "tests" but this reaction. There's nothing wrong with tests, but there certainly is a cost to them, are you getting a positive ROI? Has the system been perverted to focus on tests vs. tests supporting quality? Are tests used to justify all sorts of unrelated actions or inaction? Now repeat this exercise with 100 or 1000 other perfectly valid concepts that can help destroy the the very thing that you are trying to accomplish.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#692

Post by skeeter2020 »

agarren wrote: post #351

> [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works. That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification…

It's wild to think that someone who purports to be an expert would compare an assembly line to AI, where the first is the ultra-optimization of systems management with human-centric processes thoughtfully layered on top and the latter a non-deterministic black box to everybody. It's almost like they are willfully lying...

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#693

Post by sanderjd »

bugtodiffer wrote: post #667
0xEF wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any manufacturing process is subject to quality controls. A few things on this illusion: * Any manufacturer will do everything in their power to avoid meeting anything but the barest minimums of standards due to budget concerns * QA workers are often pressured to let small things fly and cave easily because they simply do not get paid enough to care and know they won't win that fight unless their employer's product…

> * Any manufacturer will do everything in their power to avoid meeting anything but the barest minimums of standards due to budget concerns in capitalistic countries, yes

Communism doesn't exactly have a great reputation for quality either. This is a human problem.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#694

Post by coliveira »

> A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and three universities found that programmers’ use of an A.I. coding assistant called Copilot, which proposes snippets of code that they can accept or reject, increased a key measure of output more than 25 percent.

Study paid by MS finds that MS tool is improving productivity...

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#695

Post by ModernMech »

Flemlo wrote: post #505
ModernMech wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's new and impressive and changing things, but nevertheless it's still underdelivering because the over-promising is out of control. They are selling these things as Ph.D. level researchers that can ace the SAT, pass the MCAT, pass the Bar, yet it still has trouble counting the R's in "strawberry".

The strawberry thing is solved. Nonetheless it's different things. Just because they struggle with that makes all the other things wrong? Underwhelming? I don't think so.

It's not solved, I had tried it across the latest versions of several different AIs before I posted, because I anticipated a reply like yours.

> Just because they struggle with that makes all the other things wrong?

No, it makes their grandiose claims very tenuous. But for me, yes I'm very underwhelmed by what AI is capable of. I think it's a useful tool, like a search box, but that's it at this point. That they are branding it as a Ph.D. researcher is just blowing smoke.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#696

Post by [deleted] »

noiv wrote: post #248
OptionOfT wrote: post #171

To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded. It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and ex…

I feel you and would personally pay a bit more for LLMs trained on 'senior code'.

[deleted]

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#697

Post by ModernMech »

noiv wrote: post #248
OptionOfT wrote: post #171

To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded. It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure. Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and ex…

I feel you and would personally pay a bit more for LLMs trained on 'senior code'.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of the code they spit out is tutorial-level code you find on beginner websites.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#698

Post by Timpy »

agarren wrote: post #351

> [Harper Reed] cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works. That just strikes me as an odd thing to say. I’m convinced that this is the dividing line between today’s software engineers and tomorrow’s AI engineers (in whatever form that takes - prompt, vibe, etc.) Reed’s statement feels very much like a justification…

I keep feeling like there's a huge disconnect between the owners/CTOs/managers with how useful they think LLMs _are supposed to be_, vs the people working on the product and how useful they think LLMs _actually are_. The article describes Harper Reed as a "longtime programmer", so maybe he falsifies my theory? From Wikipedia:

>Harper Reed is an American entrepreneur

Ah, that's a more realistic indicator of his biases. Either there's some misunderstanding, or he's incorrect, or he's being dishonest; it's my job to make sure the code that I ship is correct.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#699

Post by wavemode »

n_ary wrote: post #513

> Andy Jassy, the chief executive, wrote that generative A.I. was yielding big returns for companies that use it for “productivity and cost avoidance.” He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon doesn’t give customers what they want “as quickly as possible” and cited coding as an activity where A.I. would “change the norms.” Like what exactly is Amazon giving us here? I don't…

Jassy is one of the most anti-employee CEOs I've ever seen. Which is remarkable, considering who he is the successor of.

Re: At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work

#700

Post by jcranmer »

bckr wrote: post #614
HenryBemis wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that, (the way I see it happening more and more in the real world): - tests are ran by machines - linters are (being) replaced by machines/SaaS services (so.. machines) - formal verification: yes - SHure, 5 people will review the thousands lines of code written every day, in a variety of languages/systems/stacks/scripts/RPAs/etc. or they will simply check that the machines return "green-a-OK" and ask the…

> Devs are cost center, not a profit center. They are "value enablers" not "value adders". I don’t understand this and I think it would require breaking my brain in order to. A person pays the company to provide a service. The developers create and maintain (part of) that service.

A business tends to break its components down into different units or departments, and then (from a financial perspective) largely boils down those units into "how much money do you spend" and "how much money did you bring in as income." Software being a cost center means that the expected income of the unit is $0, and thus it shouldn't be judged on its operating profit. It doesn't mean that software doesn't have value, that investment in software doesn't bring greater rewards.

But it does mean that the value that software brings isn't directly attributable to investment in software (as far as the business can see). And being more invisible means that it tends to get the shaft somewhat on the business side of things, because the costs are still fully visible.

Post reply on HN